I remember watching Sesame Street when I was a kid and noticing something different about it. There were scenes that took place entirely on the steps of a brownstone, neighbors running into each other on their way out the door. I didn’t fully understand it, but it was intriguing and memorable. There was something about the setting that I liked.

Sesame Street, set in Manhattan, conveyed the neighborliness of city life. Image: Urban Review STL

Apparently I wasn’t the only child who came away with that impression. Steve Patterson over at Network blog Urban Review STL is surveying readers about their early memories of the show. Patterson says that growing up in the suburbs, Sesame Street was one of the only signals that the way his family lived wasn’t the only model:

Forty-four years ago today a new children’s program debuted that was very different from predecessors such as Howdy Doody (1947-1960), Captain Kangaroo (1955-1984), and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001). These earlier shows weren’t set in the gritty inner-city. I was a few months shy of being 3 years old when Sesame Street first aired on November 10, 1969, so I didn’t notice the change. Mister Rogers Neighborhood had only been on the air a year.

To my eyes Sesame Street seemed exotic, nothing like where I lived. Sure, I’d see neighbors, tinkering in their garages or sitting in a lawn chair — on their driveway. But the interaction was different on Sesame Street, they couldn’t help but run into neighbors as they went about their lives. Since my dad worked on new homes, I rarely got to experience older/walkable neighborhoods closer to those on Sesame Street.

Thankfully our family doctor had his office in OKC’s Capitol Hill area, a once-thriving shopping area similar to the Wellston Loop. My father would also do carpentry work on his personal home from time to time, it was located in the historic Heritage Hills neighborhood, just north of downtown Oklahoma City. Otherwise I saw new homes going up in subdivisions far from the center. We drove to buy groceries, clothing, etc. — anything really other than a few things I might get at a convenience store I could walk/bike to. We shopped at an L-shaped strip mall built in 1965 called Southwestern Plaza 1+ mile away, or a big Sears, also from 1965, a mile further away.Watching Sesame Street, though, I knew there was another way to live. I’m not sure when I got too old for Sesame Street, but the images of the conversations on the front stoop stayed in my memory.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Streets.mn attempts to put a value on car-free streets. The Urbanophile considers the tangible and intangible costs of canceling a transportation project that’s already under construction, which might happen to the Cincinnati streetcar. And People for Bikes considers the clearest way to describe bike infrastructure that separates cyclists from motor vehicle traffic.

Even Mr Rogers neighborhood seemed like a walkable inner suburb to me, the sort that might have had streetcars a generation ago.

Sesame Street was so important to me growing up in the burbs, and still (as of the last time i saw it a few years ago) shot with some segments with real kids outside in New York City.

http://Streetsblog.net Angie Schmitt

Mr. Rogers was from Pittsburgh. I don’t know for sure if it was filmed there, but I think it was. Pittsburgh is awesome.

Larry Littlefield

So it was those communist hippies who indoctrinated the Millenials! As noted below, don’t let Fred Rogers off the hook. He had a trolley, and didn’t sing “It’s a beautiful day to be safe and isolated in my fortress, would you please get off my lawn.”

The bottom line is the suburbs were built for working adults who had already had their mates, already had friends they were too busy to see much, and drove to work. This is the phase of life when people purchase houses, and for a few decades they didn’t think much about what would come later.

The suburbs don’t work as well for those at other phases of life whether the young seeking to find mates and make friends (Rush, Subdivisions), children, or seniors. The suburbanites ended up driving their children around in minivans, and when they can’t drive anymore they (or younger people who will once again be sacrificed to pay for them) will have a problem.

http://atlurbanist.tumblr.com ATL Urbanist

Seeing Mr Rogers walk around his neighborhood was a big influence on me just like seeing the kids and adults walking around Sesame Street. Definitely had an impact on me as I grew up in drive-only suburban cul-de-sacs.

https://greenwaycommuter.wordpress.com/ Tal F.

On the other hand, my daughter is confused how Curious George knows his neighbor’s name in the “country” scenes. We live in NYC and, unfortunately, it is true that we barely know any of our neighbors, even in our own building. The “neighborly” scenes on Sesame Street do not ring true for me, and they never did, but they are certainly a nice aspirational example.

Mr. Rogers neighborhood was first in Toronto as his show was put on by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Or perhaps I should write neighbourhood.

Then he moved to Pittsburgh.

BlueFairlane

I disagree that suburbs don’t work for children. I don’t know about today’s children who all lead very planned lives enforced by parents who don’t enjoy uncertainty, but I found growing up in a suburban environment a wonderful experience. I lived close enough to people to have plenty of friends, but there was also easy access to a more natural world. There were places to explore. We could play in undeveloped woods or wander nearby fields. There was a little creek not far away where we could catch frogs or jump on rocks. I could never have had that kind of childhood in, say, Chicago where I live today. My own children didn’t have those kinds of experiences, and they had access to fewer friends in their city neighborhood than I had in my suburb.

The problem with the suburbs for children isn’t the structure of the neighborhoods themselves. It’s the refusal of parents to let their kids out to explore, and that’s a constant in both city and suburb.

http://scorcher.org/ Jym Dyer

I grew up in Pittsburgh, and even went to the same school as Mr. Rogers’ son (different grade, though). Definitely a local treasure. I was fascinated by the trolley, since our streetcars were long gone.

This is a great article; I had much the same reaction to the urban scenes in _Sesame_Street_. Also, when I moved to NYC, it all turned out to be absolutely true!

http://scorcher.org/ Jym Dyer

Actually he started the puppet show in Pittsburgh, moved to Toronto and created the neighborhood, then returned back home to Pittsburgh.

http://scorcher.org/ Jym Dyer

My experience living in NYC was the exact opposite.

Larry Littlefield

“I found growing up in a suburban environment a wonderful experience. I lived close enough to people to have plenty of friends.”

Depending on yoru age and the age of the development where yoiu grew up, you might find the suburbs a little different today.

As I noted, working age adults drive the housing market, so when a suburb is new you often have a large wave of families of about the same age moving in. So even as the total number of housing units within a child’s independent walking distance is not high, the number of potential playmates of about the same age can be.

That changes as the decades pass and the suburb becomes mixed with regard to the ages of its homeowners. There may not be a playmate on the block anymore. I’ve had a number of contemporaries who grew up in the suburbs and had this experience, eventually choosing new developments for that reason.

BlueFairlane

I grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My suburb was built in the 1960s. I’m sure that in some suburbs what you say is true. In others, it isn’t. A suburb isn’t automatically a wasteland for kids. The number of young parents I know leaving the city for the suburbs seems to bear this out.

John L.

I, too, grew up in the suburbs, and remember riding my bike all over town and playing games in the street. But the experience of suburban life is not uniform, and it has changed with the increase in traffic volume over the years. Older, inner ring suburbs with short blocks, smaller lots, and sidewalks may have far more neighbor-to-neighbor interaction than a newer cul-de-sac subdivision. When I was playing with my friends on my suburban street there were less than half the number of registered automobiles in LA County than there are today. The increased traffic means parents feel less safe allowing their kids to ride around the neighborhood and play in the streets than they did when I was a kid. Higher traffic volumes will likewise adversely affect the use of outdoor street space for play or neighborly socializing in urban areas, too.

BlueFairlane

But the experience of suburban life is not uniform, …

Exactly so, just as the experience of urban life isn’t uniform. Just as parents in some suburbs are more concerned about traffic, parents in some urban neighborhoods are concerned about safety. There does seem to be a uniform sense among parents everywhere that all parts of the world are more dangerous than they used to be, and this perception affects both urban and suburban life. I’m sure there are parts of my city where life is like Sesame Street. My neighborhood isn’t one of them, and I have yet to see a neighborhood that is.

James

Suburb is kind of a wide term. It’s kind of like “middle class”. Even though it’s mathematically impossible in an economically diverse society for everyone to have been middle class, you can talk to people as diverse as doctors and Walmart assistant managers who seem to think that they are just that. Everyone in America who didn’t grow up in Mississippi or New York seems to think they grew up in the suburbs, and that’s also kind of blurry and unspecific.

I grew up in what I thought were the the alienating suburbs, but by the standards of the “city” I live in now, my upbringing was in some ways kind of urban (I’m very appreciative of those aspects of my town now that I see the contrast). My town had two trolleys, and even (it’s it downtown) had the endpoint of the subway/el into Philadelphia. Things were walkable(ish). I biked a lot. I think suburbs like mine are largely good, although I might change things about them in some ways.

But you could go to some other suburb outside of Philadelphia, like the more famous Levittown, and find the Dennis-the-Menace ’50s type of suburb. That’s not a place you can walk very much. It’s technically got a train, but the station is on the other side of a large multilane highway, and the only thing on the other side is a big parking lot Walmart. This is what’s bad about the suburbs.

I think growing up in a small town or a large city can be great, but it depends on what kind.

James

I’m loving all the Pennsylvania references that are happening in this comment thread. #Philly #Pittsburgh

BlueFairlane

Suburb is kind of a wide term. …

Which is precisely why I disagreed with the original poster’s assertion that the suburbs don’t work well for children. Some suburbs do, just as some urban environments don’t. It all depends on the specifics of the place.

But you see this sort of blanket simplification often on this site, trying to sort the divide into urban vs. suburban vs. rural, and define all parts of each category by the broad brush that fits the argument of the moment. All suburbs are bad, all cities are good, when the truth is you can find a hundred places that by themselves prove or disprove either argument. Suburbs are not automatically bad. There must be some benefit to them, or else they never would have become as popular as they are. And there are downsides to city life. Neither is homogenously one or the other.

JamesR

Same here. I think it varies by neighborhood. There are lots of cultural microclimates within this city. I’ve found that folks here in Riverdale where I live are pretty standoffish, but I’ve got friends and acquaintances who live in places like Fort Greene and Astoria who regularly have neighbors within the building over for coffee or dinner.

Lauren Alpert

I live in Albany, NY and I can’t tell you many times I have been late getting somewhere or delayed arriving home because I ended up talking to a neighbor or friend that I ran into.

Elisabeth von Uhl

This post definitely rings true for me… growing up in a small suburb in Wisconsin, I wanted so badly to move to a bigger city for its energy and density. Now, I live in the Norwood community in The Bronx (I used to live in the Morris Park section of BX and people were very unfriendly and stand-offish) where I can walk to the library, my doctor’s, my son’s doctors, the park, the grocery store, and my neighbors are very “neighborly” and, most importantly, are consistent, safe presences (either on my doorstep or on the street) in my and my son’s life. It definitely makes me wonder what my son (now two) will pine for when he grows up… a car with isolated places to drive to or a dense, urban area that encourages walking and social interactions.

Anne A

That happens a lot in my Chicago neighborhood, or the neighborhood where I used to live and still know many people.

Interesting. I’m a little younger than the other posters on here – I watched Sesame Street, but the urban show that really influenced me was Hey Arnold! It showed kids who had a remarkable degree of freedom to move around, explore, socialize, and play as they wished – enabled by sidewalks, playgrounds, and transit. Really gave me a (so far) lifelong passion for cities.

Of course, there were the liberal multi-culti messages in the show too; the titular character lived with his grandparents in a boarding house with an Asian immigrant, a divorcee, etc – all with hearts of gold.

Nathanael

Streetcar suburbs are awesomely wonderful. Even former-streetcar suburbs are often pretty nice.

Levittown suburbs…. aren’t. They’re a problem. And the problem is structural.

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